Hungary has been a member of WHO since it was established on 7 April 1948 with an intermission between 1949–1954, when all countries of the “Eastern Bloc” withdrew from their membership following the order of the Soviet Union. Since 1954 there has been a progressive cooperation between Hungary and WHO, becoming quite intense from the 1960s. Moreover, three of the European Regional Committee’s presidents were Hungarian (1969, 1988 and... Read more ...

Mental Health Declaration and Action Plan had regulatory effects on the national level, since an issue that had formerly been absent from the national agenda has been brought up, partly as a result of the formal collaboration between WHO and Hungary, but mainly as a result of self-regulation, i.e. the European/international ‘language’ of mental health policy was adopted partly as a way of conformity, partly as a rational step in the hope of funding... Read more ...

In an era of post-bureaucratic regulation, transnationalisation and evidence-based policies, the appeal for change in any policy domain is always an appeal for research and expertise (both national and international). Knowledge and cognitive authority legitimize public policies. ―Evidence‖ is often lacking, though. Read more ...

A lack of public debate, lack of listening to the voice of local actors is the most commonly articulated criticism to the events of the PA, most decisions were made top-down, with very little influence by local actors, especially at the beginning of the program. Read more ...

The most popular international instrument of the Educational field, PISA, did not affect the SEN-field (directly): "In the PISA survey the sample‘s margin of error is 5 % and since the rate of SEN children is usually below 5 %, in most of the countries these children were not included in the analysis. It is especially true for countries where these children go to segregated schools or special classes".
But there is a series of SEN-specific international institutions and instruments. The... Read more ...

Knowledge-Policy constellations are either distinct technologies of governance, or, more simply, highly observable crystallized forms of regular interaction that lead to the incorporation of specific SEN related knowledges into the public action. Read more ...

The dissemination of knowledge can take different forms: launching institutions (the SEMC, the Special Education Methodological Centres) designed for diffusing knowledge and good practices, or fighting bad practices and promoting good practices at the same time (quality assurance through "equality experts" in charge of the LPEEOP); extending state-initiated training programs (targeting both special educators and "regular teachers"), introducing new tests and protocols, as well as new... Read more ...

The objective of the public action studied by the Hungarian health team was to reduce the number of students with special educational needs [SEN] and to fight the over representation of ethnic Roma and lower class in segregated educational settings (special schools and classes). Read more ...

In order to understand the DRG system in use, we conducted a fieldwork in a teaching hospital in Budapest. The fieldwork took place in the spring of 2010 at the surgery clinic of a medical university. Read more ...

Since health reform has an accentuated significance in the Hungarian political context ever since 1988 the relation of the different actors to the reform thinking and to each other is not independent from their positioning in the post-communist setting. Thus, historical path dependency is an influential aspect in the process. Both knowledge production and appropriation related to the health reform is steeped in this massive political self-definitional... Read more ...

The way Europe relates to bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy is complex, because Europe itself is diverse and comprises different spaces where tensions between bureaucracy and postbureaucracy play out in various ways. This new context challenges both research and policymaking, requiring much greater reflection on the nature of knowledge and its mobilization in policy. These problems were the central concern of the European project KNOWandPOL.